Deer beside the lake in the park at Doddington.
Jock, the humiliated and cuckolded husband, was the obvious suspect and he was subsequently charged with Errol’s murder. At the trial he put in a witty and polished performance in the witness box – and was acquitted. But the blanket coverage of the trial both in Kenya and the United Kingdom and the associated scandal destroyed him. After the trial, he headed back home, and when he arrived at the dock in Liverpool he was met by agents investigating his dubious insurance claims.
A few months after his return to England, in December 1942, Jock committed suicide at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool with a morphine overdose. He left behind a tangled legacy – and, as Issie often noted, 60 pairs of shoes.
The upshot of all this was that what should have been a huge inheritance for Jock’s son, Evelyn (Issie’s father), was massively reduced. The vast estate was less than 10 per cent of its former size, a ‘mere’ 1000 acres. If an estate that size was to continue to support even a much reined-in Delves Broughton lifestyle, a major rethinking of how the estate functioned as a business would clearly be necessary.
The park at Doddington had been occupied by over 1100 Polish refugees in Nissen huts during the war. They stayed on for a few years afterwards, providing Evelyn with a meagre but welcome income from the government. But with the army no longer requiring Doddington Hall itself, Evelyn leased it out to Goudhurst Ladies College and in 1946 most of the contents of Doddington were sold at auction. This was a common occurrence at the time, when many stately homes were turned into prisons for young offenders, schools – or simply demolished and the contents sold off.
After the Polish refugees left, Evelyn, who was brutally practical, set about turning his remaining land into a modern farm. He killed the 300 fallow and red deer in the park, cut down many of the trees planted by ‘Capability’ Brown, now mature and valuable as hard timber in the post-war reconstruction, and then ploughed the park up and turned it into farmland.
The decision paid off. Over the next 20 years he made Doddington Park Farm into a state-of-the-art dairy, beef, corn, sheep and potato farm – and a great commercial success. Isabella described it as being run on factory lines.
Evelyn’s greatest agricultural success was growing potatoes. They became a very successful cash crop, especially after he won a contract to supply potatoes to Walkers Crisps. Once, he told me, a manufacturer desperate for potatoes had paid him £9000 in cash for a large pile of spuds. Evelyn, who had a pathological aversion to paying tax, did not pay the money into the bank, thereby obviating the need to pay any levies on the sum, which gave him great pleasure. The local bank manager in Nantwich mournfully commented, ‘Sir Evelyn, we have not seen you in here for such a long time.’
On other occasions he flew with Issie to Switzerland, where he would deposit the potato money into his Swiss bank account and return the following day. For the night Issie and her father would stay in luxury at the Palace Hotel. A Swiss bank account was a not unusual accessory for a rich man at the time – my father, far less wealthy, opened a Swiss account and deposited £250 – but it was illegal.
Evelyn’s austerity drive complemented his miserly streak. Once, Issie was invited to stay at Chatsworth, the home of the Duke of Devonshire. One of her best friends from Oxford, Anthony Murphy, had married the Duke’s youngest daughter. Issie asked her father for some money to tip the butler at the end of the weekend. Evelyn reluctantly agreed – but insisted Isabella write him a cheque for the £10 he gave her. On her return to Doddington, Evelyn plied Isabella for details on the set-up at Chatsworth, particularly wanting to know how many footmen there were. When he presented Isabella’s cheque at the bank to get his £10 advance back, the cheque was returned. Isabella recalled with glee that her father tried to re-present it several times before giving up.
Issie put a cheerful gloss on her father’s penny-pinching ways, but his habits often made life difficult or socially embarrassing for her. In 1979 she was invited by her friend Mimi Lady Manton to stay with her at her home in Yorkshire. She had a special guest coming – the unmarried Prince of Wales. She told Issie, ‘You have goofy teeth and will make him laugh.’
When Issie excitedly told her father that she was going to the same house party as Prince Charles, she asked for some money to buy an evening dress, a not unreasonable request.
Her father’s reply was, ‘Beg, steal, or borrow.’ And he meant it. He was not going to give her any money for mere fripperies.
Evelyn may have been stingy but he did have a sense of propriety – he rejoined Lloyds Insurance to pay off his father’s frauds, he claimed.
His big cut-back was to move into what had been the head gardener’s cottage, located about half a mile from the Hall. Isabella was to resent this all of her life. She described it to me as ‘a hideous pink house’ with a ‘1950s wing’ and ‘a carport’ which her father built onto it. Evelyn had decorated it with pictures bought ‘from Boots the Chemist’, according to Issie. His favourite was a painting of a scantily clad Caribbean girl weaving a basket – now in the possession of Isabella’s youngest sister, Lavinia. Issie told me that she always knew her parents had ‘bad taste’.
Isabella’s mother, Helen Shore.
Isabella’s baptism certificate. She was baptised on Thursday 12 March 1959, at the age of four months.
Evelyn admitted freely – almost proudly – that he was a cultural philistine, and this would bring him into sharp conflict with Isabella, who grew up as a child yearning for the lost beauty and glamour of Doddington Hall, ever-visible just across the fields.
By 1955, with Doddington running successfully, Evelyn, now aged 40, married Helen Shore. The daughter of a successful Manchester greengrocer family, she was ambitious and clever, and had been called to the Bar in 1951 at the age of 21. Evelyn had in fact been briefly married before, to Elizabeth Cholmondley, so he and Helen had to content themselves with a service of blessing at St Simon the Zealot’s church in Chelsea in 1955.
At the time of Isabella’s birth, Evelyn was 43 and Helen 28. Isabella was born three years after the marriage. Julia was born in 1961 – and then in 1962 the longed-for son and heir, John Evelyn, finally arrived.
The birth of a son settled all the inconvenient questions of inheritance that had been lurking unspoken in the background following the birth of the two girls, Isabella and Julia. It was quite clear now what would happen to Doddington Park – it would pass to John on his father’s death. He may not have been able to afford to live in the splendour of the big house, but the prospect of a male heir redoubled Evelyn’s determination to work at his farm. After a generation of scandal and financial disaster, it seemed that things might finally be starting to turn the corner for the Delves Broughtons.
Newborn Isabella at the London clinic with her mother, who has had her make-up and hair done, which Issie later strongly approved of.
One can understand, then, why the loss of Johnny was so devastating. Evelyn belonged to an age and a class which valued males more highly than females. He did little to spare his grieving daughter’s feelings on this account.
After Johnny’s death, he considered leaving Doddington Park to his closest male relative, Simon Fraser, Master of Lovat, the eldest son of his sister Rosie, and himself in line to inherit from his father,